Sensitivity analysis of launch activities in Low Earth Orbit

Abstract

This work aims to in­ves­ti­gate the re­sponse of the low Earth orbit en­vi­ron­ment to the change in num­ber and dis­tri­b­u­tion of new launches and to un­der­stand the ef­fects of the size and post-mis­sion life­time of a large con­stel­la­tion of space­craft. The analy­sis pre­sented in this pa­per were car­ried out us­ing MISSD, Model for In­ves­ti­gat­ing con­trol Strate­gies for Space De­bris, a multi-shell, and multi-species source-sink sta­tis­ti­cal model able to sim­u­late the in­jec­tion, re­moval and in­ter­ac­tion of six type of ob­jects up to an al­ti­tude of 2000 km. The re­sults sug­gest that mul­ti­ple re­gions ex­pe­ri­ence a sen­si­ble in­cre­ment in the or­bital den­sity when slightly in­creas­ing the launch ac­tiv­ity for the next 200 years. Re­cently, many pri­vate com­pa­nies ex­pressed their in­ter­est in putting large con­stel­la­tions of satel­lites at 1100–1300 km al­ti­tude. How­ever, re­sults show that the launch of just six ad­di­tional space­craft per year in this re­gion in­creased the spa­tial den­sity by an amount equal to the pro­jec­tion over 200 years of to­day's most crowded re­gion. Re­sults also show that the in­crease in the or­bital pop­u­la­tion and col­li­sion risk caused by the pres­ence of large con­stel­la­tions could be mit­i­gated us­ing a high level of post-mis­sion dis­posal com­pli­ance, re­li­able de­or­bit mech­a­nisms and re­duc­ing the­p­ost-mis­sion life­time to 5 years.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Hugh G. Lewis: orcid.org/0000-0002-3946-8757

ORCID for Camilla Colombo: orcid.org/0000-0001-9636-9360

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